Rebaone Finger’s practice is keenly preoccupied with the ever-elusive status of the cheese girl, which has historically been understood as a class indicator within black South African urban culture.
It is born from the ability — or inability — to afford cheese for your lunch box sandwich, circulating within the ecosystem of black South African townships as a marker of social and economic class disparities.
Finger will be showing an exhibition of works at the Circa gallery in Cape Town during the HEAT Winter Arts Festival, which runs from August 6 to 16.
She describes her practice as a meditation on the imperfections and contradictions of society. She says she imagines thinking through conspicuous consumption in a global and local context as it pertains to the life of black elites, and in doing so, her “practice is invested in tapping into both silent and loud indicators of social class. From nails to food, bouquets... potentiated as an alternative way for blackness to exist beyond suffering.”
This opens up her practice as one where she uses iconoclast imagery in her ceramics to mediate on black utopian futures that are invested in liberating the expansive nature of what it means to express ourselves in daily life.
In her art, she presents ceramic replicas of popular street food such as maotwana (chicken feet), which is a delicacy for black families, adorned with long acrylic nails, a privilege attached to the gendered beautifying economy we are trapped in as an indicator of glamour and economic accessibility.
In line with this, she evokes a decaying Kota, a food parcel popular in black townships which packs a punch in slap chips, a Vienna sausage, egg, atchar, or a Russian sausage. The more ingredients encased by the half loaf of bread, the bigger the indicator of flashy expenditure. Finger says that at her home in Bloemfontein, the Kota is ranked “from your G-Wagon, to your Toyota Yaris!”
Though Finger is concerned with constructing black futures that move beyond the perpetual pain and oppression that has historically been attached to our likeness, her speculative thinking resists the lure of blind optimism, individualistic self-advancement, and material gain as measures of freedom or worth.
Unlike narratives that frame African bodies and minds through the lens of white, neoliberal ideals of success — often defined by capitalist hierarchies and systemic inequality — speculative decolonial work rejects these reductive frameworks. Instead, it becomes a tool for uncovering the suppressed complexities of African existence.
Grounded in historical consciousness, Finger’s practice challenges us to confront uncomfortable truths, embrace new ways of seeing and continue the work of healing and liberating or varied existences. Finger says she “wants a future, or a utopian world which allows blackness to be exactly what it is, or what it wants to be. A blackness that is allowed to look beyond its immediate suffering.”
Borrowing from contemporary Instagram tropes and then juxtaposing that with culturally and historically loaded foods like maotwana is a means of disrupting different markers and standards of living, be it economically, socially, or geographically within a local context.
She strikes an impeccable balance between things she recognises and relates with as a young black South African middle-class woman, and also things that still influence her lived experience that also feeds into the Instagram algorithm of what we conceptualise as opulence.
Finger also holds a sensitivity for observing contemporary languages of excess and opulence, indicators of success, that visually inundate social media platforms.
She quips about the 100 rose bouquets we see all too often posted by influencers and celebrities as a symbol of love or the aspirational relationship underpinned by a capitalistic Westernised economic utopia. Themes like this have propelled her ceramics into a much larger scale than we have seen from her, namely her graduate show last year at Michaelis School of Fine Art.
She allows me a sneak preview of some pieces for the Cubicle Series at Everard Read in August, nestled safely in the kiln. Let us prepare for excess, opulence and speculative absurdity as we are called to savour monstrous bouquets of maotwana. As they say, go big or go home.
The HEAT Festival runs from August 6 - 16 in Cape Town. The full programme can be found at heatfestival.org and tickets can be purchased through Quicket.
This article was first published in HEAT: EMERGING ARTISTS YOU SHOULD KNOW. Visit www.heatfestival.org for a free copy.
